In Preparation

I won’t be leaving for Germany until July, but I thought I’d start this „record“ now for a few reasons. The first is that I want to chart my progress learning the language. I began studying German about a month ago at my university on an accelerated course. By the end of the year I will have completed the first four quarters (1.3 years) of the German sequence here, but God only knows how that will prepare me for the real thing. I am terrified of speaking to foreigners in their language, and even more so when there is a good chance they know mine; even more so when their language is almost impossible to speak without tripping over my own tongue and sounding like a complete moron.

However, the language isn’t my primary concern. It’s the culture. I was talking to another student in my class last night during an all-night reading binge at the library, and he shared with me some very interesting insights about the very significant differences between Russian and American culture. I’ve never been intimate enough with another culture to recognize the subtleties he spoke of so comfortably–the manifestations of sexism, absence of the Protestant work ethic (yes, we talked Weber), and how these small differences add up to a complete irreconcilability of social and political theory. Obviously it’s easy to say in the abstract, but I want to experience and recognize these differences on my own. I will be refining this statement for some grant applications, but I hope it at least makes sense in this manifestation. Now, back to Rousseau.